A pendulum or a stopped clock? Rupture,continuity and political change in English sub-national government under Labour

Abstract

This article discusses the most recent round of sub-national (i.e. local and regional) policy development under the incoming (2024) Labour Government. It unpacks the policy landscape which has tentatively emerged since the Starmer Government has taken office, and addresses the implications, questions and challenges which are immediately apparent. It suggests that, rather than simply tearing down the previous structures of sub-national governance, the incoming Labour Government is attempting to deepen those structures. Nevertheless, it therefore also concludes that many of the shortcomings and unanswered questions of the Conservative approach of the last decade therefore remain. The paper unpacks what this might mean for practitioners and researchers working in this area, contributing to emerging reflection on how the new government might be more effective in addressing the key challenges facing the United Kingdom.

Introduction

This article discusses the most recent round of sub-national (i.e. local and regional) policy development under the incoming (2024) Labour Government. It addresses the policy landscape and legislative programme that has tentatively emerged in the place of the ‘Levelling Up’ agenda, and the implications, questions and challenges which are immediately apparent. In doing so, the paper unpacks what this might mean for practitioners and researchers working in this area contributing to emerging reflection on how the new government might be more effective in addressing the key challenges facing the United Kingdom (Cairney et al., 2024).

Local governance reform in the United Kingdom is never created in a vacuum, and as we will explore is often the product of a near-constant churn. It is also rare that anything in this sphere is wholly new. Therefore, the broader context under which policy emerges matters.

Informed by the context outlined above this paper reflects on the arrival of a new Labour Government in 2024, and how it has unfurled its policy agenda for the sub-national state, both in terms of an overwhelming parliamentary majority, but also in terms of a Manifesto which was noted for its vagueness. In doing so, it also considers how this period remains rooted in the changes to sub-national government structures in England through the ‘long 2010s’ – the period since the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent elections of Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition (2010–2015) and majority Conservative (2015–2024) governments – and the ‘legacy’ of those periods. The paper outlines and reviews the main changes over this period emphasising that continuity as well as rupture forms part of the repertoire of how governments address the issue of sub-state government for England. Accordingly, the paper develops as follows. First, it provides a brief overview of the decade-or-so of reform preceding the new Labour Government. Second, it discusses the central elements of Labour’s programme for sub-national (i.e. city regional and local) government. Third, it reflects on the core questions arising from this programme of activity and how researchers might examine its success, or otherwise.

An overview of the preceding decade-or-so of reform

From the 19th century onwards, the local government geography of the constituent territories of the United Kingdom has been reformed many times (Briggs, 1963; Hunt, 2005). Underlying these changes (and the frequent rescaling of institutions) have been different arguments about the appropriate scale for the development and delivery of policy. This has included reflection on the appropriate units within which to deliver certain functional services such as planning, waste management, transport and housing; debates about the appropriate scale at which political representation should be organised often with a concern to see improved levels of citizen engagement through appropriate alignment of institutional boundaries with local/regional identities and concerns to see institutional geographies that can best foster economic growth and regeneration by working to realistic boundaries as regards functional economic areas and markets for housing and employment and inward investment (Berry and Giovannini, 2018; Sturzaker and Nurse, 2020, Sturzaker and Sykes, 2023). Within this wider picture of change, institutions at the ‘larger than local’ scale such as city regions or wider regions (e.g. the North West of England) have proved particularly mutable. Major reform in the 1970s, for example, introduced a scale of Metropolitan County Councils in the largest English conurbations, before they were abolished in the 1980s. Similarly in the 1990s and early 2000s regional development and spatial planning structures emerged at the scale of ‘regions’ which operated at a level larger than the metropolitan scale, before being abolished in 2010.

In this way, changing government usually means the ‘unpicking’ of the previous government’s reforms and remoulding in its own image. This process often takes place through what is described by Diamond et al. (2024) as a ‘Hyper-active Incrementalism’ – a short-term, reactive response that has been described by Sturzaker and Nurse (2020) as a ‘patchwork quilt’ of reform. This is a trend that is borne out over more than half a century. However, much like the Blair Government, which began to build on the foundations of the Government Office Regions founded under the Major Government, the early indications suggest that the Starmer government’s own sub-national strategy is built upon the foundations of a decade of reform under the Conservatives. Therefore, in order to understand what Labour are proposing, we must understand the context under which those proposals emerged. To this end, we will now briefly explore this period across four distinct phases.

The early 2010s – Initial gutting

In the best traditions of British governance discussed above, the first period of the Coalition Government involved the dismantling of the previous structures developed under the New Labour approach. The Government Office Regions were thus swiftly abolished – maligned as a ‘soviet, tractor style’ way of working (DCLG, 2010a). What followed would set the tone for much of the approach for the subsequent 14 years. Here, in came Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) which were heavily premised on a city region/travel to work area thinking (DCLG, 2010b; Pugalis, 2011). At the same time, City Deals would be struck with cities, unlocking powers on a case-by-case basis and creating a multi-stream approach depending on the ability of local leaders to engage and negotiate (Waite et al., 2013).

Following criticism of a lack of political accountability (Marlow, 2019) and using powers created under the previous Labour Government’s Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act of 2009, the Coalition also began creating Combined Authorities which, in many cases, directly mirrored the composition of the Metropolitan Counties abolished under the Thatcher Government (Sykes and Nurse, 2017). In this way, the shift in focus towards city regions which had begun in the 2000s became much clearer and, by 2014, many of the foundations were set for the main thrust of Conservative sub-national reform.

The Northern Powerhouse

The next significant shift came in mid-2014 when then Chancellor, George Osborne, announced plans to create a so-called Northern Powerhouse which would be premised on a wholesale devolution of power to the newly minted Combined Authorities (Nurse, 2015). Manchester was the first of these (Haughton et al., 2016), to be followed first by a string of Northern Cities, and other core cities in the Midlands (i.e. Birmingham) and South (i.e. Bristol). Political accountability would be facilitated through the creation of directly elected ‘metro’ mayors who would, variously, take greater responsibility for economic development, planning and transport measures. Again, the ability to ‘deal-make’ would dictate the strength of devolution.

Following elections in 2017, the first intake of Metro Mayors began to enjoy a national political profile, allowing them to make high-profile challenges to the Government, including on pandemic restrictions ((Nurse, 2020). Though at times embarrassing for national government when Labour Mayors could determine the political weather, the presence of Conservative mayors in high-profile mayoralties meant that there was little appetite to neuter the mayors and this perhaps confirmed that the devolution ‘Genie was out of the lamp’ (Cox, 2016).

A time of torpor (2016–2019)

The administration of Theresa May (2016–2019) was, largely, characterised by torpor as the political focus on negotiating ‘Brexit’ – the UK’s departure from the European Union – following the 2016 membership referendum consumed the legislative agenda. There were, however, some important rhetorical shifts during this period. A powerful narrative took hold following the vote to leave the EU that this was the product of the revolt of a ‘left behind’ Britain bypassed by new cycles of wealth accumulation and hardest hit by the budgetary austerity of the 2010s (Sykes, 2018). Though analysis showed that most ‘leave’ voters belonged to the middle class and lived in southern more affluent parts of the United Kingdom (Dorling, 2016), it seemed as though the accepted position became that ‘Brexit’ was a function of disaffected voters, often in smaller cities and towns, voting against a system which had neglected them. Given this, it might seem counterintuitive that May sought to downplay the focus on Northern England where many such places were situated and instead sought to emphasise a ‘spatially blind’ all places approach (Mance and Bounds, 2016). The UK-wide Industrial Strategy (HM Government, 2017) adopted at this time prioritised high-tech industries primarily located in metropolitan areas and prosperous areas of middle England, rather than the areas characterised as ‘left behind’ which had neither the industrial nor the skills base to capitalise on potential growth in those sectors (Nurse and Sykes, 2020).

Against this wider backdrop of ‘Brexit-induced’ torpor and a more ‘nationwide’ focus, the devolution journey started in the first part of the decade continued to evolve in those places which had come under its ambit and in 2017 the first raft of Metro Mayors were formally elected. However, as a consequence of the political deadlock in Westminster, they would find themselves with limited powers due to a failure to pass the necessary legislation which would formally devolve many of their powers (Sturzaker and Nurse, 2020). Elsewhere, other devolution attempts stalled as deal-making processes with Central Government broke down (Halliday, 2016) or were rejected for not fitting with central narratives (Singh, 2018).

‘Levelling Up’

The latter years of Conservative government became defined by the rhetorical device of ‘Levelling Up’. This term, coined by Boris Johnson, largely reflected the May approach of focussing on the entire country rather than specific geographic locales. In time, the Government suggested that Levelling Up would be delivered, and measured, against 12 ‘policy missions’ (DLUHC, 2022). These were, largely, seen as simply a drawing-together of other government initiatives under one banner (REF). In this way, and from the beginning, Levelling Up quickly became vulnerable to accusations of logical inconsistency and lack of focus (Jennings et al., 2021; Newman, 2021).

This inconsistency also gave way to accusations of the kinds of ‘pork barrel politics’ so often seen in the United States (Hanretty, 2021). For example, analysis of both the Towns Fund and the Levelling Up Fund found that monies and projects were often allocated to Conservative-held places which were objectively less deprived, whilst overlooking more-deprived places which should nominally have received funds under the Government’s own criteria (Nurse, 2023; Nurse and Sykes, 2023).

Following Johnson’s resignation in mid-2022, and the calamitously short premiership of his successor Liz Truss, the focus on Levelling Up began to fall away during the Sunak government (2022–2024). This was, perhaps, exemplified by the abandonment of the northern-most leg of HS2. However, by this point, the reality was that of a government hamstrung by the rhetoric of a former-leader, and a scarcity of vision of its own. In this way, by the end of Sunak’s term, Levelling Up was simply ‘a ghost’ (Nurse and Sykes, 2023). Perhaps this was inevitable. One of the striking things about the whole Levelling Up period was an apparent unawareness – or perhaps unwillingness to acknowledge – that the challenges that ‘Levelling Up’ purported to address had been the object of many previous rounds of regional and regeneration policy dating back as far as the mid-20th century.

By the end of the 2019–2024 parliamentary session, which was as much defined for its political instability as it was for policy action, English devolution – which as described above predated the Levelling Up interlude – nevertheless found itself in a relatively advanced position. Many of the original Combined Authorities had recently held their third elections, and indicating the benefits of a strong personal mandate – one of the core tenets for their introduction – many were returned on improved majorities, whilst the Conservative Tees Valley Mayor, Ben Houchen, retained his position despite dire national polling for his party. Yet, the 2024 mayoral elections also revealed the writing on the wall for the (at the time, unannounced) 2024 General Election, with the Conservatives losing control of the West Midlands, and Labour taking control of all-but-one of the English mayoralties in the process.

Thus, upon their election in July 2024, the incoming Labour Government of Keir Starmer had a mixed inheritance. Although they inherited a strong platform of politically friendly Metro Mayors with which to work, they also inherited a policy landscape which had largely turned its back on the core cities (Nurse, 2023), crippled their funding sources (Lowndes and Gardner, 2016) and left them scrambling for other alternative sources in the wake of the retreat from the EU (Nurse and Sykes, 2023).

For its part, and mirroring the broader platform, the Labour Manifesto (Labour Party, 2024) remained coy on the specific detail about what would be done regarding sub-national governance if Labour were elected. There was a commitment to ending Levelling Up – something to be expected given the clear rhetorical ties to the Conservatives and the perception of largely underwhelming progress on this agenda (Financial Times, 2024; Pickard et al., 2024; Stacey and Halliday, 2024). However, against the backdrop of a consistent message of fiscal restraint, a commitment to devolution was emphasised, with the Manifesto stating that ‘In England, Labour will deepen devolution settlements for existing Combined Authorities’ and ‘We will also widen devolution to more areas, encouraging local authorities to come together and take on new powers’ (Labour Party, 2024: p.40). The underlying assumptions in the Manifesto also tied devolution and relevantly scaled institutions and power-holding to the delivery of growth. In stating a goal of ‘Economic growth across the country’, the Manifesto thus clearly stated that ‘Every town and city across the country has a vital contribution to make to our economy. But too many areas have been held back because decisions are often taken in Westminster and not by local leaders who understand local ambitions and strengths’ (Labour Party, 2024: p.40).

The close-coupling of promises to enhance devolved institutional capacity with the objective of promoting growth thus represents a continuity in assumptions which overarch changes in governing regimes – for example, from Labour (1997–2010); through the Coalition (2010–2015); to the Conservative majority governments of 2015–2024. At least as far as devolution in England is concerned this perhaps indicates the English habit of wholesale post-election restructuring might be about to be broken.

‘Tippexing out’ the gimmicks: Sub-national policymaking under Labour

The detail of the incoming Labour Government’s agenda emerged swiftly in the wake of their election victory. Deputy Leader (and now Deputy Prime Minister), Angela Rayner, was appointed to the Department of Levelling Up, Communities and Housing. Her first act was to rename the Ministry, saying ‘The department I lead will be the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’, decrying the now-deleted ‘Levelling Up’ slogan as a ‘gimmick’ which, another Minister said, would be ‘tippexed out’ – that is, immediately abandoned using the analogy of erasing a mistake, as if to mark a symbolic break with a failed policy pursued by a previous government. Here, government ministers emphasised the significance of the rebranding which replaced Levelling Up with Local Government saying that this ‘is important … because Levelling Up was only ever a slogan it wasn’t a thing people felt in their communities’ (BBC, 2024a). The earlier deletion of the word ‘local government’ from the Ministry’s title in 2021 had caused concern in the local government sector (Kenyon, 2021) so this move was also symbolically significant in hinting that a renewed value and importance would be attached to sub-national government by the new administration. A Downing Street meeting with the Devolved Mayors on the government’s second working day would also provide a statement of intent – giving the impression that they were a high priority. However, with Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham expressing the desire that the Government commit to the Northern Powerhouse in comments made before the meeting (something that would not happen), it became apparent that the mayors were not necessarily the drivers of this agenda.

This early activity set some of the mood ahead of the King’s Speech which formally established Labour’s legislative agenda for the upcoming term. Accordingly, though many of the announcements were not especially surprising, the King’s Speech provided more detail.

Echoing some of the messaging during the election, the central theme of the King’s Speech appeared to be around creating a ‘modern, thriving economy’. Here, it was made clear that the Metro Mayors and Combined Authorities would play a key part in this agenda. A central plank of this would be delivered through the introduction of an English Devolution Bill (ironically dubbed the ‘Taking Back Control’ bill in some quarters (Stacey and Crerar, 2023), in a wry dig at the rhetoric which surrounded the processes of negotiating ‘Brexit’). This should, in essence, deepen some of the existing governance and funding arrangements and expand these to other areas, whilst giving some new powers over economic growth to the mayors. A ‘Better Buses’ bill will also give Mayors more control over their public transport networks, providing the ability to take control over local bus services – effectively suggesting that Greater Manchester’s strategy of taking public control of bus routes has been working and is evidently something others want to replicate.

In the round, what is particularly striking here is that the Labour Government appears to be sticking with the current structures of government rather than attempting wholesale reform. Although it could be argued that, with all-but-one of the current Metro Mayor roles controlled by Labour, they don’t wish to undercut their own electoral success, it is also clear that after 14 years of Conservative Reform in this area, there is at least a tacit acknowledgement that the Conservatives did get some things right by building on rather than eschewing the legislative basis for English devolution and the creation of Combined Authorities established by the previous Labour Government of Gordon Brown (2007–2010).

However, amidst this, there is one potentially significant reform which addresses some of the critique levelled at the Conservatives – namely, how the mayors are represented on the national stage. Specifically, Labour have announced their intention to create a ‘Council of the Regions’ through which the Metro Mayors will be able to feed into national debates and have a say in issues which affect them and the areas they represent.

This, perhaps, addresses a gap which was brutally exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which Metro Mayors were not consulted regarding pandemic response measures, including when their own regions would be placed into lockdown measures. This led to an instance when Andy Burnham allegedly discovered measures for his region had been announced mid press-conference (Nurse, 2020), and set the scene for the mayors trying to resist central government control over what happened in their regions. Here, and for all the rhetoric regarding ‘Levelling Up’ and the ‘Northern Powerhouse’, this lack of a forum with which to meaningfully engage with national decision-making is something which has been missing from this debate. This came with a tacit recognition that, even despite 14 years of supposedly decentralising reforms, in the words of the Prime Minister, as the seat of government Westminster kept a ‘tight grip’ over England’s biggest cites and that ‘that those with skin in the game – those that know their communities – make much better decisions’ (BBC, 2024b).

Unsurprisingly, the Mayors welcomed this approach, with Andy Burnham describing it as ‘music to my ears’ with the hope that ‘meeting regularly means we can be sure the voices of Greater Manchester and the north of England are heard at the heart of Whitehall on an ongoing basis’ (BBC, 2024a).

As always, these proposed reforms should not simply be taken at face value, and the putative stages of Labour’s sub-national agenda both leave many questions unanswered and appear to fail to address some of the fundamental issues left outstanding by the Conservatives. It is to those issues that we now turn.

Outstanding and unanswered questions

Mind the gap

One of the core take away messages of Labour’s early agenda is that the current structures of English Devolution will remain. Going further, it is also clear that their desire, much like the Conservatives before them, is to expand those powers to any Combined Authority which wishes to take them on.

Now that most of the English cities are party to a Combined Authority/Devolution Deal, the sporadic geographical coverage of the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ when the first Mayoral elections were held in 2017 is diminishing to an extent. Nevertheless, there still remain swathes of the country that, currently, are not party to such a deal (Nurse, 2024).

Here it is notable that Labour has distanced itself from any rhetoric regarding ‘Levelling Up’, ‘rebalancing’ or any such equivalent. In this way, ultimately, the Labour agenda seems to embrace cities as the growth engines of the UK economy. This is something recognised by George Osborne, and rhetorically abandoned in the wake of the EU referendum – even if Theresa May’s industrial strategy was still heavily framed around cities (Nurse and Sykes, 2020). Yet, questions remain as to how those not party to a deal, and currently outwith of those structures will benefit significantly from the reforms, or indeed how Labour will engage with the broader processes of socio-economic disengagement which some have claimed fed into the discontent which underpinned the Brexit vote. Here, rather than bridging the divides, will we see this new period of devolution retrench the ‘islands of growth amidst seas of despair’ which encapsulates the Dorling and Thomas (2004) vision of the United Kingdom as an archipelago economy?

Austerity isn’t over

Above all else, the single issue which defined local government under the post-2010 Conservatives was austerity. This saw local authority budgets, which are heavily regulated by the centre, slashed over a 10-year period (Lowndes and Gardner, 2016; Lowndes and McCaughie, 2013) and culminated in several local authorities (e.g. Birmingham) ultimately declaring themselves bankrupt as they could no longer meet the burden of providing all the core local public services.

However, Labour have remained largely silent on this issue, and with the new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, remaining particularly hawkish on the state of the UK’s public finances, it seems highly unlikely that the English local authorities can expect a significant reprieve from their financial dire straits. There is also the question of what if any funding settlement for the Combined Authority will go towards, and how much, if any of these monies will reach struggling local authorities who reside within them to fund other core public services.

In this way, the situation for local authorities remains particularly bleak, and certainly does not look like it will return to a pre-2010/pre-austerity state any time soon. In this way, we can ask if the country might see more local authorities declaring bankruptcy in the coming years, or if the Labour Government might change tack and seek to relieve overburdened town and city halls?

What role for the Council of Regions?

Although the Council of Regions has been warmly welcomed in some quarters, there are questions here too. Already, the Prime Minister has been keen to avoid overly formalising the proposals saying that:

‘I don’t want to overly formalise it, but I do want a degree of formality so that it’s a meeting that everybody knows is a meeting where business is done, where decisions are properly recorded and actioned’ (BBC, 2024a).

Here, therefore, there are questions regarding how much this forum will achieve. What powers will it have and, specifically, will it serve as a vehicle for the cities and regions to advance their agendas with government, or for government to advance its agenda with the cities and regions? Where will the balances of power lie, and who will benefit? These relationships may take some time, or require a significant incident (e.g. a pandemic style event), to be truly tested. ¹

We can also ask: who gets a seat at the table? It is clear that the mayors will attend, as will representatives from the devolved nations. However, as discussed above, there are significant portions of England which are not represented by those structures. Will they be effectively shut out? Who will represent those voices? Again, the risk is that by pursuing a city region-centred agenda, those on the peripheries remain there (Weakley, 2024).

What does ‘control’ look like?

Labour’s vision for English devolution was initially dubbed the ‘Taking Back Control’ bill. Whilst, of course, this is a political dig, if draws two questions out into the open which have not truly been articulated: Control of what, and by whom?

Amidst this agenda, it is evident that some (or more) of the levers of power are to be handed over to the Metro Mayors. Yet it is equally clear that some of the more significant levers – not least funding – will still be heavily dictated by Westminster. At the outset of this agenda, Hambleton (2017) described it as ‘centralisation on steroids’. Going further, it is equally clear that the focus here is on the Combined Authorities, and the leaders of the major cities (i.e. Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham) which sit beneath the Combined Authority Metro Mayors may find themselves distanced in this debate.

In this way, Labour have done little so far to unpick the patchwork quilt of reform (Sturzaker and Nurse, 2020) which had slowly layered under the Conservatives. Rather, it seems content to continue adding to it. This will not provide clarity – particularly for those sat beneath the Combined Authorities, and who are primarily working at the coalface of local public service delivery (Weakley, 2024).

Conclusion

In broad terms, the incoming Labour Government has not precipitated an earthquake of reform. There is, undoubtedly, a clear distancing from the rhetoric which characterised the previous government – and particularly that of Boris Johnson. Yet, there appear to be no plans for a fundamental redesign of the architecture of local government which departs from the paths and models developed and trialled over recent decades. Indeed, the direction of travel is being maintained and perhaps strengthened with underlying assumptions that more areas need to be allowed to benefit from devolution. This tends to confirm the view that, in unleashing devolution of this kind in England, it would be hard to roll back (Cox, 2016).

Although little has changed in governance terms, the almost complete lack of discussion of local government finance (i.e. an end to austerity) serves as a significant elephant in the room and should serve as a check on any notion that local government is ‘turning a corner’. Going further, it is also clear that those who were distant from these structures (i.e. left behind places) often remain so. Thus, we should also ask what the prospects are for those places. In essence, does the ethos of the Northern Powerhouse that the rising tide will lift all boats (Nurse, 2015) remain? In doing so, we should note that whilst the rhetoric of ‘Levelling Up’ has gone there seems to have been no return to earlier notions such as ‘rebalancing’ which accompanied the roll-out of the devolution and Northern Powerhouse agenda in the early 2010s, or ideas of economic, social and territorial cohesion which underpin EU regional policy. At present, a clear picture of the mechanisms which might deliver greater opportunity and inclusion for the so-called left behind places has yet to emerge. In the meantime, it seems that the default position is that England has returned to the cities as the engines of its growth.